ANCIENT FOREST WISDOM

Mrs. Trowbridge was very fond of her brother, Thaddeus. He was a skilled wood craftsman, using only time-honored, old-fashioned methods in all of his woodworking tasks. It was Thaddeus, you may recall, who provided his roomy cottage in the village for family gatherings. As he grew older, he took a bad fall on his back porch and severely injured his shoulder. That unfortunate event dampened his enthusiasm for climbing ladders. From that point he began to seek out other less hazardous ways of using his skills, preferably indoors.

The Indian tribes that inhabited the rain forests for thousands of years, specifically the Makah and the Ozette people, used sphagnum moss for plugging holes and insulating their lodges. I found it not surprising that the small creatures of Huckleberry Hollow used the same ancient forest wisdom as did the Indians that lived nearby. Mrs. T's painting above shows how the Trowbridge shrews used sphagnum moss as a roofing material to keep their dwellings warm and dry through the winter months. I shot the above photograph just a few miles west of Huckleberry Hollow, near Irely Lake in the Quinault region. It is a of grouping of shelf fungus cloaked in a thick layer of sphagnum moss. An interesting footnote: We who live in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States are more than willing to pay someone like brother Thaddeus good money to keep moss off of our roofs.